Don’t Throw Away Your Leaves or Trimmings | Green Life Productions

Notill is about investing in living organic soil and if you’re removing trimmings or leaves from your system you’re missing out on the opportunity to mix vital nutrients back into your soil. Steve Cantwell, owner and operator of Green Life Productions in Nevada, goes into detail.

Transcription

I always put that in the category of a “fair share”. I always feel like we gotta give a little bit back to the soil. Your plant is up taking specific macro and micronutrients and depositing in the surface of the leaf. All those nutrients are being stored right there. Then to take that and throw it away, you just threw away nutrients and now you’re going to go out and buy more nutrients. When you could take that leaf and find creative ways to get it to work back into the system. Whether it be throwing it on top of your soil and letting your biology work it in slowly over time. Whether it be part of a composting process or part of some crazy tea. Whatever the idea may be, but finding a creative way to get that leaf back into the system. Again, you’re closing loops. You have less trash, you have less need to buy more nutrients. you’re now actually investing into the soil. You’re feeding the soil. (Less labor) Less labor, yeah! Just less issues across the board. It’s definitely, the more novice no-tillers they definitely have to catch up as far as that goes. They have to make sure they’re feeding the soil, but at the same time, you don’t want to overfeed your soil. If your buffing a whole plant and you got a fifteen-gallon plant and you’ve got eight inches of leaf surface on there, wet chewy fan leaves, that can lead to a problem as well. You’re going to make sure you’re breaking up your leaves and you’re limiting how much you’re actually stacking on top of each other because it will suffocate your soil. It will get hot. (It will create issues.) It can create issues. Too much of anything can become an issue or an imbalance.

When I’m trying to decide if I’m going to drop this leaf on my soil or not, one of the things to look at is how green is my soil, how brown is my soil? If I’m looking at a soil that’s got lots of brown material on it, then I know I can drop plenty of leaf on it without overheating, saturating, or smothering my soil, I mean going anaerobic. If I look down and see a bunch of green material already on top of my soil and I’m just going to throw more green material on top of it, I know that I’m at risk of suffocating the soil. So I just keep in mind your green and brown ratios. I love throwing leaves on top of brown stuff. Anytime I see brown I’m looking for something green to throw on top of that brown. It seems like it just gets eaten up faster.